The media debate has been escalating for months between prominent American broadcaster Tucker Carlson and the American ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. This confrontation reached its peak following a widely circulated interview last February, during which Huckabee’s statements sparked a massive wave of controversy and criticism.
In the latest chapter of this debate, Carlson renewed his attack in a press interview, explicitly accusing Huckabee of “supporting the killing of civilians and children in Gaza,” which re-highlighted the sharp divisions over American positions on the war.
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Lacks offensive response Refutation
Huckabee’s response did not come through a direct media confrontation, but rather through a letter he sent to a newspaper before publishing it in full via his account on the “X” platform. Huckabee tried to evade the accusation by shifting it towards the Hamas movement, using offensive rhetoric and harsh language, without providing an objective refutation of the essence of the accusation against him.
The ambassador based his defense on the repeated Israeli narrative that attributes civilian casualties in Gaza to their use as “human shields,” a claim for which Israel has not provided conclusive evidence despite its continued repetition since the outbreak of the war.
Huckabee also criticized Carlson’s focus on the numbers of Palestinian casualties, referring to the killing of “1,200 women, children, and the elderly” during the attacks of October 7, 2023.
Numbers that contradict the official narrative
However, the Open Source Unit’s review of official Israeli data reveals a stark contradiction with what Huckabee proposed. Figures show that the total number of Israeli deaths is approximately 1,200, a large percentage of whom are regular military personnel and reserve forces, rebutting the suggestion that all victims were civilians.
Moreover, Israeli reports acknowledged that a number of deaths were caused by the Israeli army’s own fire during the operations, in the context of activating what is known as the “Hannibal Directive,” which aims to prevent the capture of soldiers at all costs.
Recycling refuted claims
In the context of his defense, Huckabee recycled previously refuted narratives, most notably allegations of mass atrocities such as “beheading children” and large-scale crimes.
Despite the widespread promotion of these allegations, they lack actual proof, and official American and Israeli authorities even retracted them in previous stages due to the absence of supporting evidence.
A review of the official lists of the dead confirms that the number of infants is very limited, which completely negates the stories circulating about documented incidents of the beheading of large numbers of children.
Invoking emotion over facts
Huckabee’s speech was dominated by a charged emotional nature and harsh descriptions, in an attempt to frame the conflict within a sharp moral narrative, but this speech lacked reliance on accurate data, whether at the level of statistics or documented facts.
Journalists and analysts pointed out in subsequent comments that the ambassador’s response reflects a reproduction of propaganda narratives designed to justify military operations, rather than a documented response to the accusations.
In the end, this debate shows that Huckabee’s defense strategy did not depend on refuting the accusations with facts, but rather on regurgitating disputed narratives, some of which are refuted and unproven even in the Israeli sources themselves.
The American ambassador to Israel had previously stated during a television interview that the Israelis did not target children in Gaza, and added that they could have killed all the children in less than a day.
Source: The island + Israeli press + social media sites
